Our ESG objectives include the following:
- Reduce our global environmental footprint
- Maintain a socially responsible and ethically sourced supply chain
- Prioritize the health and safety of our global workforce
- Advance equity, diversity and inclusion at our company and within the community
- Develop programs and reporting for ongoing improvement
Environment
MaxLinear takes our common stewardship of the environment seriously. Among other things, we monitor our global environmental footprint, both directly and indirectly, and in our development efforts, our engineers are consistently focused on improving the power efficiency and thermal performance of our chips, minimizing waste, promoting recycling of reusable materials, and providing customer satisfaction through compliance with global environmental regulations as they relate to our products and operations.
As a fabless semiconductor design company, we do not manufacture our products and, with respect to the activities we conduct directly, we believe we leave a limited environmental footprint. With respect to our indirect environmental impact, we monitor the practices of our foundry partners and believe that each of them has made a public commitment to integrate sustainability and sensitivity to environmental impact into their manufacturing processes. For example, three of our largest manufacturing partners, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Intel Corporation, and United Microelectronics Corporation, each maintain well-developed environmental management and sustainability programs that are publicly avowed and supported by the highest levels of management within those organizations. We aim to have a majority of manufacturing partners that are certified with ISO 14001 international standards for environmental management systems and plan to launch manufacturing partner audits in the near future. We also participate in recycling of integrated circuits and boards. Additionally, our products are compliant with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) standards in the European Union (EU).
Greenhouse Gas (GHG) CO2 Emissions & Energy Usage
MaxLinear recognizes the importance of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and its impact to the environment across our value chain. We have evaluated and continue to analyze direct and indirect emissions from our business activities, supply chain and product lifecycle. The majority of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG emissions is comprised of Purchased Electricity. We actively look for ways to use more renewable energy across locations and lower overall energy consumption. In this inaugural year of calculating GHG emissions, we have also found that the largest driver of our emissions is the Scope 3 category of Purchased Good and Services as we are a fabless designer of integrated circuits. As we build our GHG emissions history, we will analyze opportunities to reduce our overall emissions. In addition, we aim to set long-term goals for GHG emission reduction. In the meantime, we are actively reducing our emissions by purchasing renewable energy in locations where it is available, primarily for our three California locations: Irvine, Carlsbad, San Jose.
Our 2021 GHG emissions and energy usage throughout MaxLinear locations*:
| Energy and Emissions Summary | 2021 |
| Energy Usage | |
| Energy Use - Total (GWh) from Grid | 9.77 |
| Energy Use - Percent from Grid | 100% |
| Renewable Energy (GWh) | 2.06 |
| Renewable Energy (Percent) | 21% |
| Non-Renewable Energy (GWh) | 7.71 |
| Non-Renewable Energy (Percent) | 79% |
| GHG Emissions | |
| Scope 1 (Direct) Emissions - CO2e (tonnes) | 324 |
| Scope 2 (Indirect, Electricity)** - CO2e (tonnes) | 3,857 |
| Scope 3 (Categories 1, 2, 3, 6, 8)*** - CO2e (tonnes) | 244,189 |
| Category 1 - Purchased goods and services | 233,097 |
| Category 2 - Capital goods | 7,614 |
| Category 3 - Fuel-and energy-related activities (not included in scope 1 or scope 2) | 2,924 |
| Category 6 - Business travel | 259 |
| Category 8 - Upstream leased assets | 294 |
| Total CO2e (tonnes) - Scope 1&2&3 | 248,370 |
*Electricity data from the below locations was not available. These locations were not included in Scope 2 Purchased Electricity nor Energy Usage; however, they are accounted for in Scope 3 Upstream Leased Assets.
• Austria
• Canada
• Germany
• Massachusetts, USA
• Oregon, USA
• Chennai, India
**Scope 2 total uses the Market Based method for Scope 2 Purchased Electricity. Location Based method emissions are not included, which do not account for renewable energy purchased. Location Based emissions = 4,320.53
***As Scope 3 emissions are comprised of assets not owned or controlled by MaxLinear, we have compiled data for applicable categories where available. We continue to reach into our value chain to obtain additional information from our upstream and downstream counterparts. Our current Scope 3 data set consists of the below activities:
Category 1 - Purchased goods and services: Product inventory purchases; non-production related product purchases
Category 2 - Capital goods: Production photomasks
Category 3 - Fuel-and energy-related activities (not included in scope 1 or scope 2): Extraction, production, and transportation of consumed fuels and fuels consumed in electricity as well as generation of electricity that is lost in transmission and distribution
Category 6 - Business travel: Employee air travel; mileage reimbursement information between MaxLinear Carlsbad and Irvine offices
Category 8 - Upstream leased assets: Office leases utilized to estimate electricity for locations not accounted for in Scope 2 Purchased Electricity
As noted above, we believe our products improve the quality of life for consumers around the world, mostly notably during the pandemic as we helped make possible the Internet backbone and infrastructure on which everyone has relied for more than a year. On the other hand, the same infrastructure that made work-from-home and virtual parties a reality is a substantial user of our energy resources. To counter this adverse energy impact, we design our chips with specific objectives intended to reduce energy use by the end products in which they are incorporated.
The projected exponential growth of network data and data traffic generated and consumed by social media, on-demand streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, and data center and cloud-based services, the proliferation of interconnected appliances in the home, within industry, and by enterprises, frequently referred to as the “Internet of Things (IoT),” and the advent of the 4G/5G wireless mobile internet are each driving unprecedented growth in energy consumption. Our CMOS broadband, high-frequency analog and mixed-signal, digital system-on-chip (SoC) solutions have exceptional levels of functional integration that drastically reduce power consumption across a wide range of the broadband communications, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multi-market customer market applications. In the majority of these systems, overall power consumption can be ascribed to multiple transceivers in a system, each of which receives and amplifies weak data signals and conversely transmits strong data signals to other receivers while maintaining excellent signal quality. At our founding, we pioneered broadband high-frequency radio transceivers integrated with complete digital signal processing systems in CMOS on a single-die for televisions, cable data modems and video gateways – our products and technologies reduced power consumption of each transceiver function by a factor of 10 to 50. As a result, we believe that today’s worldwide annual shipment of 250 million televisions and cable data modems requires 40,000 Megawatts of less power generation annually than they would have otherwise needed in the absence of our innovations. These energy savings are equal to the total energy consumption needs of four megacities, each the size of New York. We continue to lead and pioneer technology innovations that advance our ability to achieve the highest levels of integration of all analog and radio-transceiver and digital signal processing functionality on the same chip, which drastically reduces power consumption by elimination of signal transitions between multiple discrete chips and subsystems in large high-volume data bandwidth energy intensive applications. These applications include cable, copper, and fiber-optic multi-gigabit data access modems for home; in-home data distribution using WiFi, MoCA, or G.hn wired connectivity technologies; 400/800 Gbps optical transceivers that connect cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) servers to switches and routers inside hyperscale data centers; 5G massive-MIMO antenna radio transceiver arrays in wireless base-stations; and wireless and optical transport networks that haul data traffic between connecting base-stations, data centers, and end user connections. By reducing the power consumption in these systems by an estimated two to fifty times the consumption under conventional approaches, we also simplify costly thermal designs that would otherwise be environmentally harmful by requiring bulky inefficient fans and other refrigeration systems.
We believe that in order to address many of the energy resource and environmental challenges facing the world, the pace of energy-efficiency innovation must outstrip the rate of increase in energy consumption by the data intensive communications applications on which we increasingly rely and which will continue to form the backbone of our evolution as a society. We are continuing to pioneer new technology and innovation through investments intended to develop monolithic or integrated power management and high-power regulation silicon products that transform the efficiency of power provisioning in electronic systems. Our continued innovation in power regulation and provisioning with “smart telemetry” will minimize idle-mode energy wastage and instead ration power in an application or system based on functional utilization versus today's mostly “Always ON” systems. We believe that our technology investments in power-regulation, power-provisioning, and power-telemetry will have a transformative beneficial impact on the energy needs of our interconnected world.
Socially responsible and ethically sourced supply chain
We are committed to the use of a socially responsible supply chain to reduce the risk of human rights violations and the use of conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold, or 3TG) from the Democratic Republic of Congo and certain adjoining countries. Our efforts include maintaining a business partner labor standards policy which bars the use of forced or child labor and slavery and a conflict minerals policy governing the use and distribution of 3TG minerals, as well as conducting due diligence before allowing a potential supplier to become a preferred supplier. We request the return of reporting forms related to conflict minerals from our suppliers under the Responsible Minerals Initiative, or RMI, Conflict Minerals Survey. We file an annual conflict minerals report (https://investors.maxlinear.com/). Further, we seek to remove any suppliers that continue to fail to meet our business partner labor standards and conflict minerals policies after being provided the opportunity to remedy non-compliance via implementation of a corrective action plan. We also conduct internal trainings for all employees and certain select contractors on export compliance, anti-corruption and anti-slavery, and insider trading.
Health and Safety
Our ongoing focus on workplace safety and compliance to applicable regulations has enabled us to preserve business continuity while ensuring a safe work environment during the COVID-19 pandemic, including work-from-home arrangements for a substantial portion of our workforce and reduced capacity and masking for those that have returned to the office, adhering to local health authority guidelines. We are encouraging our employees to get vaccinated as they become available and will soon require weekly testing for any employees returning to the office who have not yet confirmed their status as vaccinated. We also comply with applicable laws and regulations regarding workplace safety and are subject to audits by entities such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the United States.
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
We emphasize our core values of Excellence, People, Integrity, and Compassion (EPIC) in our hiring and human resources practices as well as our customer service. Our corporate culture, focused on providing employees with opportunities, based solely on individual excellence and initiative, was instilled by founders who represented highly diverse skill sets and origins but shared a common commitment. Of our ten founders, seven were born outside the United States, and eight were diverse. Particularly over the last year, as the world addressed an isolating pandemic, we were proud that our broadband access and distribution products, engineered and supported by a workforce consisting of approximately 64% diverse employees as of December 31, 2021, helped ensure internet access for working families, students, and people in all walks of life to permit continued social interactions and business transactions in a work-from-home environment.
Our future success depends on our ability to retain, attract, and motivate qualified personnel, especially our design and technical personnel, but also our senior management and support personnel, and achieving those objectives requires us to maintain a work environment and culture that values diversity. We operate across eighteen countries and are sensitive to the many cultures and backgrounds constituting our employee base and we celebrate our diversity by fostering inclusion across our multi-national organization. We acknowledge that we, along with the semiconductor and broader technology industry, can do more to advance gender and racial equality by increasing representation of underrepresented minorities as well as females in leadership and technical positions including engineering and other roles.
Of our approximately 1,503 worldwide employees as of December 31, 2021, employees with European ancestry were a minority. While that data reflects in part our substantial presence in Asia, even in North America, 39% of our employees with a rank of vice-president or higher and approximately two-thirds of our employees generally were of diverse ethnicity or were women.
As of December 31, 2021, women represented 17% of our total employees, the majority in engineering. We are an engineering-driven company, and we are proud that women have played a substantial role in designing and developing our products notwithstanding the historical under-representation of women in university engineering departments. As of December 31, 2021, we employed 133 women in central engineering functions, representing approximately 12% of our total engineers. We believe female representation among our engineering staff compares favorably within our industry, but we remain committed to finding rewarding career opportunities for women across all functions within MaxLinear as well as to encouraging the engineering programs from which we recruit to increase their emphasis on opportunities for women. In that regard, we are also proud to have on our board of directors Tsu-Jae King Liu, Ph.D., the first female dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors.
Of our total employee workforce, 12% is represented by Work Councils in Austria and Germany. The Work Council groups, common to these countries, are comprised of employees elected by the general employee base. We consider our global employee relations to be good. In 2021, our employee voluntary turnover rate was 11%.
Our human capital resources objectives include, as applicable, attracting and retaining talented and experienced employees, advisors, and consultants. We utilize multiple online search tools, specialized recruiting firms, employee referral programs and university hires to ensure a varied outreach approach for candidates. We aim to reduce the gender pay gap that is pervasive in our industry. We offer this via a combination of competitive base salary, time-based equity incentives and bonus plans linked to financial performance that are designed to motivate and reward personnel with annual grants of stock-based and cash-based incentive compensation awards to our employees, some of which vest over a period of four years, plus other benefits, in order to increase stockholder value and the success of our company by motivating such individuals to perform to the best of their abilities and achieve both our short and long-term objectives. We offer competitive benefits tailored to local markets and laws and designed to support employee health, welfare and retirement; examples of such benefits may include paid time off; 401(k), pension or other retirement plans; employee stock purchase plan; basic and voluntary life, disability and supplemental insurance; medical, dental and vision insurance; health savings and flexible spending accounts; relocation assistance; and employee assistance programs. Our global training and development program focuses on harassment-free workplace and diversity topics, as well as ethics and export compliance.
Corporate Governance
We have recently embedded within our corporate governance principles, which are available on our website, our commitment to corporate responsibility initiatives that address environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Our nominating and governance committee has assumed responsibility in its charter for overseeing our ESG initiatives, and we look forward to continued communication to and engagement with stockholders on these matters.
Our business and operations around the world are subject to government regulation at the national, state, provincial, or local level addressing, among other matters, applicable environmental laws; health and safety laws and regulations adopted by government agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; laws relating to export controls and economic sanctions; and the rules of industrial standards bodies such as the International Standards Organization and governmental agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission.
We believe that our properties and operations comply in all material respects with applicable laws protecting the environment and worker health and safety. We do not manufacture our own products but do maintain laboratory space at certain of our facilities to facilitate the development, evaluation, and testing of our products. These laboratories may maintain quantities of hazardous materials. While we believe we are in material compliance with applicable law concerning the safeguarding of these materials and with respect to other matters relating to health, safety, and the environment, the risk of liability relating to hazardous conditions or materials cannot be eliminated completely. To date, we have not incurred significant expenditures relating to environmental compliance at our facilities nor have we experienced any material issues relating to employee health and safety. We cannot provide assurances, however, that issues will not arise in the future or that applicable law will not require us to incur significant compliance expenditures.
In addition to environmental laws, our business is subject to various rules and regulations and executive orders relating to export controls and trade sanctions. Certain of our products are subject to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), which are administered by the United States Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), and we are periodically required to obtain an export license before we can export certain controlled products or technology to specified countries or customers. In addition, the EAR imposes broad controls on entities listed on sanctioned persons lists, including the BIS “Denied Persons” list and BIS Entity list. If one of our customers is listed on the BIS Entity List, BIS List of Denied Persons, or other U.S. government sanctioned persons list, then subject to certain limited exceptions, we will, as a general rule, be precluded from doing business with that customer. We cannot guarantee that export control restrictions or imposition of sanctions imposed in the future will not prevent, or materially limit, our ability to conduct business certain customers or in certain countries. Any failure to comply with these laws could result in governmental enforcement actions, including substantial monetary penalties and denial of export privileges.
Contributing to Community
We encourage our employees to contribute to local communities. In March 2022, MaxLinear launched a relief effort contribution matching program which matches 100% of employee contributions to three organizations providing humanitarian relief to refugees of the conflict in Ukraine: Doctors without Borders, World Kitchen and Save the Children. Our efforts collectively raised approximately $60,000 in donations to the relief organizations.